“JUST ONE FIX…ONE FIX…ONE FIX…”

Even though we haven’t actually hit classic Texas high temperatures yet, we’ve reached summer for all intents and purposes, and the Czarina and I finally have a little bit of free time. Most couples look at an impending holiday or just a free weekend as an opportunity to get out of town. The Czarina and I look at each other and ask “So who wants to vacuum the bedroom?” Having two big back-to-back shows, along with the insane preparation for both, cut into our general household duties, leaving the carpet in the living room filled with…bits. We think they’re claw caps from where the cats use the scratching post to hone their already ridiculously sharp armaments, but we’re not sure. I won’t even get into the dust rhinos underneath the Czarina’s favorite chair, or the three cats’ worth of cat fur I got out of the carpet last night, or that we were both so horrified at how badly our housekeeping had lapsed that we were vacuuming and sweeping at close to midnight.

What you have to understand as well is that I grew up in a rather singular household. My father comes from a very long run of packrats, and the old Scottish frugality is very strong on his side of the family. These days, it’s called “upcycling,” but when I was a kid, it was called “growing up Riddell.” I just looked in wonder when I’d visit friends’ houses and see them using garages for holding cars, instead of band saws, acetylene torches, and enough scrap wood to rebuild the USS Constitution. When I was eighteen, I read a book review in Twilight Zone magazine that talked about how “Grandma could stretch out a Thanksgiving turkey forever, until it was mid-July and she was trying to figure out how to make turkey-flavored Jell-O from the bones.” All I could think was “Are we related?”

My mother, on the other hand, was a budding minimalist, and was notorious for pitching anything that sat in the same place for too long without a purpose. I only saw my parents get into one fight as a kid, and that was when my mother decided to donate my father’s high school prom tuxedo to Goodwill. I could sympathize on both sides, and still do: I’m notorious for letting the schmutz pile up in my office for weeks and months, until one day something snaps and everything else is secondary to stripping the place clean and rebuilding.

And that’s what’s going on this weekend. No shows for a couple of months, until FenCon IX in September, although the call of Four Seasons Markets has promise. The summer heat hasn’t really started, and I’ve never had any interest in sitting around in shorts while watching ball games on a perfectly good Saturday. So what’s the option?

That’s right: I’m taking inspiration from The Idiot Gardener and hislatest run of fence porn, and putting up a new greenhouse. If you don’t hear from me by next Wednesday, just feed what remains to the plants, okay?

Thursday is Resource Day

The first week after two big back-to-back shows (one of which was purely the Czarina’s play) gets a bit crazy, especially when you look over the back lot and realize that it’s starting to resemble a location set for a George Romero movie. The grass is high enough to hide Buicks, the roses beg for deadheading, and the hot peppers require their own ZIP codes. The only joy in Mudville comes from having a relatively cool spring: we have yet to go above 33 degrees Celsius, which we broke last year toward the end of April. It’s coming, though. It’s coming.

Hence, the weekend will be dedicated to shoveling, dumping, pruning, trimming, and mowing. I’d like to invite gardener friends over for dinner without their looking out back and shrieking in despair.

With that in mind, we only have a couple of interesting resources to bring up this Thursday, but it’s all connected to horticulture in some way. It’ll have to do until the next post, right?

Firstly, I didn’t know that Carl Mazur of the International Carnivorous Plant Society had a blog, but Zone 6b: Growing Carnivorous Plants In Cold Climates is out there and it’s definitely worth reading. This week, he brought up a very intriguing point on wondering why Sarracenia oreophila produces traps and then blooms once it emerges from winter dormancy, instead of the other way around as with other Sarracenia. I have a suspicion as to a particular factor, but I’m going to need a low-light camera in order to document it. Yet another experiment on the creaking and swaying pile.

In completely different news, nearly anyone who has ever worked a customer service position has an appreciation for the Mike Judge film Idiocracy, if only because the film envisages a world where the customers actually saw an increase in IQ. (I spent nearly three years with a headset jammed onto my ear, and started referring to some of the language used by our most enthusiastic customers as “Conversational Ichthyostegid.” There’s really nothing quite like explaining to a cell phone customer that said phone was cut off because the last payment was reported as an unauthorized use of the paying credit card, only to be told “That’s not fair! I didn’t make that payment! Smitty told me that he’d pay my bill if I slept with him!”) Because of that, I’m quite impressed with a working Brawndo sports drink fountain, because we could have used that at my previous day job. After all, it has the electrolytes plants crave, even if nobody knows what electrolytes are. (And am I the only person on the planet who has noticed that Monster energy drinks and SuperThrive smell suspiciously alike?)

Finally, one of these days, I’m going to put together a postcard comparable to Tom Wilson’s famed form letter about the film Back to the Future, covering every last repeated question. No, I don’t have any man-eating plants. No, I don’t have any plants that can eat your ex-spouse. No, I don’t have any Audrey 2s, and I’m also fresh out of Delvians, Vervoids, Krynoids, or Vegetons, too. However, after a quick visit to Leilani Nepenthes in Hawaii, I’m finally going to sell triffids. This way, when the occasional person asks if I have a triffid available for sale, I can give that person a John Cleese glare and tell him/her “Here’s your plant, NOW BUY IT!” (I just hope they don’t get too big, because I’m not looking forward to branding season.)

Well, enough of that. Back to the linen mines.

“When there’s no more room in Hell, Datura will walk the earth.”

Early last year, I wrote an article about the angel trumpet, Datura stramonium, and was inordinately proud of being probably the only garden writer alive who could name-drop “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Charles Manson, Hunter S. Thompson, and George Romero in the same article about the same plant. Since then, it’s hard not to notice Datura in the wild, as it were: it grows inordinately well in poor soils, of which the Dallas area has in abundance, and it’s tough enough to survive the worst of our summers once it has a well-established rootball. Oh, and other than caterpillars, anything dumb enough to eat it is going to have one hell of a surprise.

All of the recognized species of Datura have nicknames along the lines of “angel trumpet”, for two reasons. Firstly, the long and lush blooms are evocative of the trumpets traditionally carried by angels in Renaissance art, particularly in paintings depicting the fall of Lucifer and his covenant into Hell. That’s particularly appropriate when discussing Datura, because the odds are very good that anyone eating any part of the plant will be hearing angels, or seeing dark angels, before too long. The reason why Datura is one of the only hallucinogenic plants that’s completely free and legal to own and raise in the United States is because the effects aren’t relatively benign, as with peyote. To hear drug travelers describe it, there’s no such thing as a good trip on peyote, and it takes a particular sort of personality to look at Datura experiences as a positive thing. Besides, most Datura enthusiasts don’t remain so for long: every last part of the plant is exceedingly toxic, and what might be a suitable dose from one plant may be lethal from another.

(Mind you, as a disclaimer, anybody ingesting Datura, for any reason, is on his or her own, and neither this writer or the Texas Triffid Ranch take any responsibility for anyone using or abusing Datura under any circumstances. Even if I had any interest in mind-altering substances, I’d smack anyone I knew who was doing this in the head, in the hopes of rattling a few brain cells free.)

Considering its rather wild history, from Bangalore to Jamestown, one might wonder, understandably, who in their right mind would want to raise this in a garden. Well, so long as it’s not ingested, Datura makes a very attractive and low-maintenance addition. As the kind folks at the International Brugmansia and Datura Society will tell you, D. stramonium grows in small bushes, thriving outdoors through most of the year before dying off in the first hard frost. In warmer climes, it readily resprouts from seeds deposited the previous season, and if protected from freezing, the whole plant comes back every year from a rather tuberous-looking stem. The scent is almost literally intoxicating, and aside from tomato hornworms, it seems to be resistant to most pests. Keep children and pets away from it, and Datura makes quite the charming cover for otherwise dead spaces in backyard gardens.

As mentioned before, Datura does rather well in the Dallas area. Both D. stramonium and its close African cousin D. metel readily grow in front-yard gardens throughout the city and its suburbs, and I’ve been surprised on several occasions by Datura perfume on quiet nights along the “M streets” intersecting Greenville Avenue. (I’ll say that it’s a welcome change from the smell of skunk weed grow houses near Hillcrest and Forest Lane, let me tell you. Some of those are so pungent that the stench nearly knocked me off my bike one evening as I was traveling home from work.) I just wasn’t expecting it to be a herald, as this plant was.

To give context, this beast of a plant is located at Knox Avenue in Dallas, right at the corner where Knox travels over Central Expressway. To the left is Central. To the right is the entrance of Highland Park, the neighborhood that is to Dallas what Beverly Hills is to Los Angeles. Completely surrounded by the larger city, Highland Park is its own enclave, complete with its own schools and police force.

I couldn’t identify it for certain, but I suspect that this monster is classic D. stramonium based on the shape of the bloom buds and the leaves. The clincher, of course, is viewing the seed pods, known as “thorn apples”, as each species has a distinctive pod shape and size. Since the plant had just dealt with a torrential rain the night before, most of the upright blooms had filled with rainwater and collapsed, but the newly unfurling buds were white with just the barest kiss of purple on the edges. Give it another couple of days, and it would go back to flashing ten to twenty blooms at a time, all summer long.

Of course, half of the fun for me was in the locale. I’ve joked for years that the best documentary about life in Dallas is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and here was the plant attributed with the creation of real zombies. In that context, finding it outside Highland Park was just too appropriate.

The Texas Triffid Ranch in the news

Over a week after we all packed up and came home, Dread Central has a new report on Texas Frightmare Weekend 2012, and guess who made the photo gallery? And before anyone asks, yes, the Czarina and I are definitely planning to attend the 2013 show. As soon as spaces in the dealer’s room are available, we’re there.

Have a Great Weekend

Well, having the word “Ranch” in the company name implies that there should be some country music on the playlist, right?

Texas Frightmare Weekend 2012, Continued

More photos from Texas Frightmare Weekend 2012. As can be told, Frightmare has a lot more new and returning carnivorous plant enthusiasts than I realized.

One person in particular struck a chord, because just about everyone who regularly goes to conventions has been in her situation. This young lady came by to take a look at the plants on Saturday morning, and fell in love with the spoonleaf sundew (Drosera spatulata). Unfortunately, she related that money was really tight, and that she had enough left either to buy a sundew or to get back home on Sunday. I asked “So where’s home?”, and she told me “Norman, Oklahoma.” Since that’s also home to a very dear friend from high school and the Sam Noble Museum, I knew exactly how far she’d had to travel, and I told her that there was no way I’d take her money if it meant she’d be stuck.

Instead, I told her “I take photos of folks who buy plants, and I’ll put you in the gallery under ‘Next Time, Maybe?’”

Well, Sunday came, and she took a look at one particular sundew arrangement. Lots of sighing, and I knew that sigh. That wasn’t a sigh of “Oh, if only someone gave me something for free.” That was a sigh of “If I knew a place that bought kidneys in Dallas on a Sunday, I’d cash one in right now.” Count this one as a raincheck, kiddo. Just come back in 2013 and let me know how it’s doing, and consider buying a couple of companions when you have the cash, okay?

And that’s it for 2012. Next year, I’m definitely getting a decent lighting rig for the camera, and trying this again.

Texas Frightmare Weekend 2012: The Aftermath

Like the swallows of Capistrano, every year’s Texas Frightmare Weekend since 2009 starts and ends the same way. After spending weeks getting ready so nothing goes wrong, Friday morning opens and then EVERYTHING goes wrong. Grumble, grouse, contemplate going back to bed and not coming out until Monday morning. Rise above it, open up at 5:00 Friday evening, and then spend the entire weekend wishing that the party could keep going for the rest of the week. Come home and collapse, making plans for the next year as unconsciousness slides in. Repeat as necessary.

If there’s one big reason why I’m so enthusiastic about Frightmare, it’s because this show has one of the most interesting audiences I’ve ever seen. Quite literally, there’s no telling who may show up and say hello at the Triffid Ranch booth. Biology majors. Dentists. Stilt walkers. All of them come screeching to a halt and look surprised when they see a carnivorous plant vendor at a horror convention. I repeat: they’re the ones who are surprised.

By way of example, below is my dear friend Mischa Jordan, having left Jet Girl, Sub Girl, and Booga at home for the weekend in order to pose with a Nepenthes arrangement. Not only was she surprised to see an N. alata up close, but she was even more surprised to see the big stein it was in. (For obvious reasons, this arrangement was named “The Mullet of Metal”.)

Mischa Jordan with the “Mullet of Metal”.

Other than the initial difficulties of getting to the convention hotel and getting back out, thanks to ongoing road construction around DFW Airport, the only issue the whole weekend came from the lighting in the hall hosting the dealer’s room. Combine that with getting familiarity with a new camera, and I’ll state for the record that I plan to leave photography to the experts. Even with that aggravation, and lots of frustration with light levels and autofocusing, just look at the expressions on everyone’s faces.

As always, talking with the kids at shows is one of the great joys of setting up booths at said shows, and I had a real surprise. Among other guests was Madison Lintz, best known for playing “Sophia” in the cable series The Walking Dead, and she took a break on Sunday from signing autographs to wander around the dealer’s room. Not only was she intrigued by the plants in the first place, but she had no idea that the Atlanta Botanical Garden has a large carnivorous plant collection, including a Nepenthes collection. Since she mentioned that her teacher back home was offering her extra credit if she came back with interesting science information from Texas, I gave her my last spare copy of the May 2011 issue of Reptiles. If she becomes the Tippi Hedren of carnivorous plants when she gets older, well, it’s all my fault.

As of last check, the crew at Texas Frightmare Weekend still doesn’t have a complete count of the attendance, but I’m glad nonetheless that we were in a much larger space in a much larger hotel than in 2011. Between the Czarina and myself, when asked if we were going to be out for 2012, our simultaneous response was “Oh, HELL yes.”

More photos to follow…