James A. Baggett

Catskills Memories

Written on June 30, 2011 at 1:46 pm , by James A. Baggett

There’s nothing like spending a weekend completely unplugged in the Catkills. For years, I spent many a weekend and holiday at my dear friend Austin’s contemporary log cabin on the slopes of Mt. Trempor in Willow, New York. And I like to think fondly of good garden friends in the area: Suzanne Warner Pierot and her astounding astilbe garden and Dean Riddle and his exuberant magic carpet ride of a garden in nearby Phoenicia. No visit to the area is complete without a stop at Craig Thompson’s Shandaken Bake and sampling his perfectly imperfect pies and pastries. A self-taught baker, Thompson began his career making lemon meringue pies based on the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud for the cafe at the Kemper Contemporary Museum in Kansas City. He moved to New York and worked with high-end event-planning companies before settling in the Catskills, where he founded his bakery, which features exquisite pies, cakes, pastries, and tea cakes that are hand-baked with the seasons using local fruits. Craig says he mainly makes within the market season. “I try to make things that are currently being grown,” he says. “That’s pretty much my philosophy, following the growing season.” Thanks to our photographer friends Steve Gross and Sue Daley, we’ve got a lovely story on Craig up our sleeve for a future issue of Country Gardens. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak.

California Dreaming

Written on June 27, 2011 at 1:26 pm , by James A. Baggett

From our stash of cool locations that we’ve yet to feature in Country Gardens, one in particular caught my eye. It’s just north of San Diego in California, and features a cool shed and potting bench. When Juli Gillett bought the property with her husband Lance, they proceeded to replace the manicured lawn with garden beds, pathways, and seating areas. Today the garden features a host of perennials that have been selected by trial and error. Charming accents—like the tepee shown here—are sprinkled throughout. Here’s a sneak peek.

The Buzz on Honeybees

Written on May 23, 2011 at 3:37 pm , by James A. Baggett

You could say that bees are in my blood. After all, my Dad’s twin brother, my Uncle Steve, was for years an avid apiarist in central Indiana. Every December I could expect to find a beautiful, brand-spanking new jar of Baggett Honey waiting for me beneath my parents’ Christmas tree. And I would ration my special jar of Baggett Honey, using only a couple of tablespoons of the sweet elixir at a time on my morning oatmeal. I’ve always been fascinated by bees of all shapes and sizes, most especially our non-native honeybees. I like to show children who visit my garden how easy it is to pet the fuzzy abdomen of a bumblebee while feeding on the nectar of of my bee balm or anise hyssop. A couple of years ago, I was even lucky enough to produce a story on backyard beekeeping, so I had the chance to experience the process up close and personal. That’s me below suited up in a veil and protective overalls.

“The historic relationship between humans and their bees is long and enduring,” reads the introduction to The Beekeeper’s Bible: Bees, Honey, Recipes & Other Uses (Stewart, Tabori & Chang; 2011) by Richard A. Jones and Sharon Sweeney-Lynch, just one of one a half-dozen recent titles to come across my desk that explores the culture of bee and backyard beekeeping. “Honey, beeswax, and mead (the alcoholic drink made from honey) are part of a worldwide industry, yet, in the twenty-first century the numbers of honeybees are falling at an alarming rate, due to a mysterious condition known as Colony Collapse Disorder, which emerged late in 2006 and for which no one has yet discovered the cause. It is only as more and more of the world’s honeybees die that we are now beginning to appreciate not only hoe fragile their survival really is but also their importance to the agricultural economy globally owing to their pollination of crops. If bees are to survive into the twenty-second century, we must take them seriously.”

Here, from top to bottom, are the books pictured above:

• Confessions of a Bad Beekeeper: What Not to Do When Keeping Bees (with Apologies to My Own) by Bill Turnbull (The Experiement; 2011).

• Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper by C. Marina Marchese (Black Dog & Leventhal; 2009).

• The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture by Gene Kritsky (Oxford University Press, 2010).

• Homemade Living: Keeping Bees by Ashley English (Lark Crafts; 2011).

• The Beekeeper’s Bible: Bees, Honey, Recipes & Other Home Uses by Richard A. Jones and Sharon Sweeney-Lynch (Abrams, 2011).

• The Backyard Beekeeper’s Honey Handbook: A Guide to Creating, Harvesting, and Cooking with Natural Honeys by Kim Flottum (Quarry Books; 2009).

Secrets to Better Birding

Written on April 22, 2011 at 2:40 pm , by James A. Baggett

Imagine my excitement to find a new bird book by my friend Kenn Kaufman waiting in my mailbox this week. Kenn’s the originator of the Kaufman Field Guide series, which includes books on birds, butterflies, mammals, and insects. He has also written Lives of North American Birds and two birding memoirs, Flights Against the Sunset and the classic Kingbird Highway. His new book, the Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), deserves a spot on your natural history book shelf. Anyone with a keen interest in identifying birds will find this book makes the learning process more enjoyable—and that truly understanding what we see and hear can make birding more fun. That’s a shot of me (above) and my former art director Jarrett Einck on a birding trip with Kenn a couple of years ago at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

To celebrate the publication of Kenn’s new book and in honor of Earth Day, here are Kenn Kaufman’s top 10 secrets to become a better birder:

1.  Put birds in boxes. No, not literally. But if you can separate birds into categories, the challenge becomes much simpler. If you can decide that a particular bird is a woodpecker, for example, then you only have to choose among a handful of species, instead of hundreds.

2.  Check the map, check the calendar. Although free-flying birds might show up almost anywhere, usually they are predictable. One of the most valuable resources you can get is a local bird checklist that tells you which species are found nearby, and at what seasons. It’s a tremendous advantage to know which birds to expect.

3.  Always look for multiple clues. In the early stages of learning, it’s tempting to settle on one diagnostic mark on a particular bird and ignore everything else about it. But this can backfire in a variety of ways. Top be sure, always look for other marks as a backup.

4.  Exercise you ears. You can train yourself to be a better bird-listener. When you hear a new bird song, try to describe it to yourself in words; the effort to describe it will help you to remember it.

5.  Shape up your birding. One of the best field marks for any bird is its shape: with enough experience, you can identify most North American birds by silhouette alone. When you’re looking at a bird that’s easy to recognize by its color or markings, take an extra minute to notice its bill shape, tail length, head size, and other aspects of shape. Then you’ll know that bird if you see it in an odd plumage or in odd light.

6.  Look at fliers. Birds fly—that’s one of the cool things about them. But many birders tend to avoid looking at flying birds, because it’s harder to see standard details on a little bird that’s moving fast in the air. Make the effort to study birds in flight, and soon you’ll be recognizing more of what you see.

7.  Fanfare for the common birds. Finding a rare bird—well, that’s exciting. But to recognize that rarity when it shows up, it helps if you know the common birds extremely well. Paying attention to the most common, everyday birds will pay off in helping you to pick out something different.

8.  Write it down. The most valuable learning tool for birding—more important than binoculars or field guide—is a pocket notebook and pencil, so that you can take notes on the spot. Not just the names of birds, but details about what they’re doing or what they look like. (If you’re brave enough to sketch the birds, that’s even better.) Concentrating enough to write about or draw a bird will hjelp to fix it in your memory.

9.  Spend more time looking. Many birders spend 95 percent of their field time looking FOR birds, and only 5 percent looking AT birds. The surest way to improve your skills is to shift those percentages: don’t stop looking at a bird as soon as you know what it is; instead, take a little more time studying each one. Birds are beautiful to look at anyway, so this isn’t exactly a grim assignment!

10.  Learn to let some get away. No one can recognize EVERY bird they see or hear—even the top experts have to let some go unidentified. So don’t worry if you can’t put a name on every bird. The important thing is to have a good time. Birding is something that we do for enjoyment, so if you enjoy it, you’re a good birder.

Winter Witchcraft

Written on March 30, 2011 at 10:31 am , by James A. Baggett

Perhaps I can force myself to stop watching the bald eagle cam (http://www.raptorresource.org/falcon_cams/) in Decorah, Iowa, long enough to show you what I found in my front yard when I woke up yesterday. Mind you, this pair of eagles is tending to three good-sized eggs, which are due to start hatching any day now, but here’s what I found:

My witch hazel (Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’), which has been blooming its head off for almost a month now, was covered with a couple of inches of heavy, late-season snow. Despite some recent disparaging remarks posted recently at a popular garden blog proclaiming witch hazels as not garden-worthy, I find their coppery tassels and spicy scent intoxicating at this time of year. It reminds me of the aroma of witch hazel at the old-school barbershop in Broad Ripple, Indiana, where my brothers and I dreaded boyhood haircuts. The essential oil, distilled from the leaves and bark, is a mild astringent used in skin care products. The natived shrub remin ded European colonists of the English “wych hazels,” whose branches were used as diving rods to locate underground water and minerals.

Poet Robert Frost—about the time of World War I—described a New England hired hand’s complaint about a young college boy:

“He said he couldn’t make the boy believe

He could find water with a hazel prong—

Which showed how much good school had ever

done him.”

Little Hostas

Written on March 11, 2011 at 1:44 pm , by James A. Baggett

While in Buffalo last summer for their awesome annual Garden Walk I was lucky enough to visit the lovely garden of Michael and Kathy Guest Shadrack tucked into 13 wooded acres, including a recent garden devoted to nothing but miniature hostas (those that measure six inches of less in height. As I’ve said, they’re the horticultural equivalent of a litter of Jack Russell terrier puppies. That’s Michael and me in his garden, above. At the time I was—and still am—head-over-heels for diminutive hostas as we’d just published a story in Country Gardens on mini hostas with Marsha Ansevics at her Flying Frog Hosta Farm in Indianola, Iowa. And I was excited to share my enthusiasm with Michael, who told me he had just completed a book on the subject for Timber Press. So I’m especially eager to let you know that Michael’s book, The Book of Little Hostas: 200 Small, Very Small, and Mini Varieties, has officially hit the bookstores. Look for our review of it in the Summer 2011 issue of Country Gardens (on sale May 17th).