The Story of Four Winds True Dwarf Citrus

Book Review: The story of Four winds growers true dwarf citrus by Floyd C. Dillon and Donald Dillon

I can’t remember where I picked up this little reprint. It says it is a  reprint from the California Horticultural Society and has lots of pictures attributed to Sunset Magazine. The dates listed are 1957-1961. 

I think this line from the first page is interesting, “Gardening habits were changing from the pleasure of growing plants to that of making outdoor living more pleasant.” Not only that but I bet the space constraints in many areas of California were driving the desire for patio sized trees.

I love this glimpse into the development of dwarf citrus and some insight into how people were thinking about their California gardens and how that was developing in the post WW2 years as Mid-Century Modern was appearing, etc. I’ll keep that for another post though.

I don’t really know much about grafting (although my partner has been doing some very cool grafting in our yard recently, I should write about that!) This little booklet goes into the exact root stocks that they found to work with each type of scion. For instance, the ones rootstocks that worked with grapefruit were not good for the Eureka Lemon. Okay! I love these dedicated plant nerds figuring all this out! Also, apparently they had a special club called the Lemon Men’s Club. 

Here is what the Huntington Library Archive has to say:

“The Lemon Men's Club, based in Los Angeles, California, was started in 1904 as a service, education, and advocacy organization for the lemon industry in Southern California, including lemon associations, shipping houses and growers. Frederick Arthur Little (1868-1965) was a leader in the California citrus industry. Born in England, Little moved to Canada and then Ontario, California, in the 1880s, where he started a lemon grove. In 1896, Little moved to Santa Barbara and helped organize the Santa Barbara Fruit Exchange before returning to Ontario in 1898, where he organized the Ontario Fruit Exchange. He later worked as packing house superintendent for the Arlington Heights Fruit Company in Riverside County and managed the Arlington Heights Fruit Exchange. Little was an active collector of materials related to the history of the citrus industry.”

Ooo, another fruitful (hahaha) link here to a write up called ‘Mrs. Bryant Again Entertains Lemon Men's Club at Field Day Meeting - The California Citrograph June 1933’. Okay, what a great rabbit hole this is turning out to be. I have a bunch of links open now about Susanna Bixby Bryant who inherited her family's ranch in 1891 and turned it into a botanic garden featuring native plants! . Damn, that is so cool. She hired the Olmstead’s firm to design it later on and then the whole thing got moved after her death? Anyway, I’ll need to read up to this more later.

Back to dwarfing citrus trees - It seems like the next big innovation was a different grafting technique called ‘twig-grafting’. I have not read up on that but it seems this method hinders the development of the taproot of the tree and that must help it stay smaller. 

The rest of the booklet talks more in depth about specific varieties. One variety mentioned that I can’t remember ever noticing is the Ponderosa Lemon. These produce really, really big lemons and I can see that they are a variety available for purchase. I’ll have to keep my eye out for them at the wholesale nursery. I think it might be a fun one to grow!

Honeysuckle Sipping, The Plant Lore of Children

My previous post about Making Daisy chains reminded me of this book I’ve been meaning to review: Honeysuckle Sipping The Plant Lore of Children by Jeanne R. Chesanow

What is my plant lore? It’s not much, really. How to braid pine needles and attempt to weave them, how to use a blade of grass as a whistle, making play environments for my glass animals with moss and flowers and sticks and stones, where to find the blueberries and chipmunks at my grandparents house… dandelion seed heads, maple seed ‘rhinoceros horns’, what else?

I had a suburban upbringing. But it was the 70’s and 80’s and supervision was lacking in comparison to current times. As I read through this book I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh yeah! I did that too!”. I think that, anyone who reads this book will have those moments of remembering too and it will bring joy.

I just love this book. The author sent out a call for people to remember and write to her about the plant lore of their own childhoods and she amassed a lovely set of stories and reminiscence.

In the intro and through out the book she mentions more ancient childhood plant lore. And, I would like to point out here, MOST of this book is white, European and European-American childhood plant lore. There are some mentions of Indigenous North American children, however. I would love to read about other cultures nature play. Note to self: see what you can find about this!

One of my favorites mentioned is a game from ancient Greece in which the kids throw a nut into a circle. Sounds a lot like the (horribly named) game cornhole, doesn’t it?!

Here is a link to a whole scholarly article about play and childhood in ancient Greece!

I’ve mentioned before that I worried about this a lot when my kid was an infant and small child. What would my kid’s childhood plant lore/memories of time spent in nature end up being?! We lived in a loft in West Oakland and there was concrete for days!

I feel lucky that my mother’s group ended up creating a Forest Pre-School which we called ‘Oakland Urban Forest Community’. We hired a Waldorf teacher and spent a ton of time trying to make it work. It DID work for quite a while and then it didn’t and I can’t even remember why! I do know that my kid spent three days a week in nature with other kids, guided by like minded parents and a teacher. They made boats out of bark and sailed them, created puppets out of natural materials for plays, went on nature walks, and many other things.

This is also one of the reasons I sent him to Park Day School in Oakland.

At home we had squirrel tea parties with flowers and seeds as the meal, we picked and ate ‘sour grass’ (Oxalis) on our walks in the neighborhood, and we made roly poly houses with natural materials, so I hope he remembers those things!

Little Free Libraries

Little Free Libraries are small personally managed 'take a book or leave a book' libraries. They are usually adorable. You can look at their Flickr gallery to see some examples of the awesomeness that people create.If you want to have your library registered and affiliated with the site you need to pay a small fee. They send you an official plaque and list your library on their map so people can find you.I would like to make mine with a green roof! I am not a builder type though and have no tools. I have a couple of friends who are and I plan on commissioning them to make this for me.

Here is my final concept:

Olive Percival and her children's gardens

The other day in a used bookstore I came across a book called 'The Children's Garden Book' by Olive Percival. I now know this is only an excerpt from the full, never published, manuscript.The first line of the forward is, "This is a book of suggestions for children to whom destiny has given such golden things as a plot of ground and many hours, or several years, uninterrupted by the city's call (ever more insistent, clamorous) to indoor amusement".And further down, "If, for the first ten or twelve or fourteen years of life, the children of today could have personal flower gardens in which to play, to study, to read, to work, to dream, the world tomorrow would be greatly lightened of it's ugly and menacing burden of materialism and general faithlessness".The next section of the book are thoughts and notes to the "to the young gardener".Here is an example, "Long ago, in Elizabethan England and when our colonial history was just beginning, a bouquet was not called a bouquet nor a nosegay nor a boughpot by those of highest fashion. It was called a tussy-mussy! Nobody seems to know why."Thanks to the internet you can read all about tussy-mussies!The books goes on with more tidbits and advice and then she shares her garden plans for children. Things like "the Fairy Ring", "The Kate Greenaway Garden", and "the Moonlight Pleasance". Each garden comes with a plant list, and illustration and planting plan and text describing details of the garden.

"In this our lovely and bedazzling world - a perplexing world that deafens and deadens us with screaming sirens, rattling dragons, many toys, and noisy amusements (omg, girl, you have no idea.) - we contrive to to remain avowed lovers of flowers, even if allowed little time or place to make plants grow and willingly or unwillingly come into blossoms."

It is so sweet. I fell in love with Olive Percival. Besides being a gardener of some fame and a published writer and poet, she was also a book and doll collector, an antique hat collector AND a milliner, an expert on Chinese and Japanese art, a traveler, and a photographer and generally a mover and shaker amongst the intellectual set of southern CA.I love her because not only was she sweet and all into flowers, paper dolls, cats and 19th century children's books but she was also a feminist and could bust out a bit of snark. We would have been friends for sure. Here's a quote from an article she wrote for the LA Times in 1910,

"As for equal suffrage, I have never in my life heard one sane argument against it. I think the only argument that men who are opposed to the measure have ever advanced in justification of their unfair and un-American position, is that they do not want women to lose their delicacy and charm by rough contact with matters political. This is not 'sentiment' but sentimentality. . . . There is no sense or intelligence about it. Women must live in the world as truly as men and in many instances they are as well equipped for the actualities of life as men. . . ."

I have acquired one other book written by her, "Our Old Fashioned Flowers". The Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA has her diaries and photographs.I may have to road trip to the Huntington Library to see her photographs and all the gardens and art that it looks like that museum and botanic garden have. It looks awesome! They have a tea room! Maybe I will go by myself for my 40th birthday (fast approaching). - Olive May Graves Percival (July 1, 1869 - February 18, 1945).You can read more about her here.I HIGHLY recommend listening to this 30 minute talk about her life. *sniff*Oh, and someone's term paper on her life here.The more you read about her the more awesome she gets.