I love ferns. I’ve always been drawn to them by their softness and quiet beauty. As children, my sister Kris and I spent many hours in the scrap of woods behind our house, gathering fern fronds. They were an essential part of our games. They …
Today I’m taking a vacation day from work, so I celebrated last night by making a new version of the vegan lemon coolers I cooked up a few weeks ago. These new coolers are a bit chubbier (I added more flour) and more sugary (I …
On Saturday night I made Vegan Lemon Coolers. It was so much fun. The kitchen smelled of lemon zest, and the windows were open so the house was full of frog songs. Rob was nearby, sweeping up piles of catnip and cat fur and legions of toy mice, and I was talking in a merry voice, saying things like “Darn, I put in too much baking powder” and “Darn, all my dough balls are coming out different sizes.” I’m a terrible baker.
Luckily, the coolers turned out tasty despite my lack of skill. They were so easy. I found the perfect recipe on Savory Experiments and veganized it.
Rob and I ate our cookies in the living room that night while watching Silicon Valley and Daredevil. Usually our cats hang out with us, but not this time. They were “camping” on the breezeway. See, in summer they like to sleep out there in the pie safe, turning the shelves into bunk beds. They sleep one cat per shelf, with little Carl on the top shelf. (Leftover cats sleep on the table.) They sigh and stretch in the warm air as moths and fireflies dance like dream creatures just outside the screens.
Vegan Lemon Coolers
Ingredients:
1/2 cup vegan butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tsps Ener-G egg replacer
2 Tbls water
1 tsp lemon zest
1 Tbls lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup powdered sugar
Directions:
In a large bowl, add the butter and sugar and beat with an electric beater until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla.
Whisk the egg replacer and water together in a small bowl until frothy. Add the “egg” to the sugar, butter, and vanilla.
Add the lemon juice and lemon zest and mix again.
Whisk the salt, baking powder, baking soda, and flour together in a medium-sized bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix again until well blended.
Place the powdered sugar in a shallow bowl. Form the dough into 1-inch balls and roll in powdered sugar. Arrange the balls on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
Bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes.
Recently we had to have all our porch and step railings replaced because they’d rotted. It took months to get them rebuilt and painted. Now that all the work’s done, I wanted to show you some “after” pictures and tell you a little about how …
One day a long time ago when I was still living in Atlanta, I was driving in the country on my way up to the mountains when I passed an old wooden house surrounded by dewy blue spiderworts (Tradescantia virginiana). The house was weathered and …
Chasmanthium latifolium is known by many common names—river oats, wood oats, Indian wood oats, wild oats, northern sea oats, upland sea oats, inland sea oats, flathead oats, upland oats, broadleaf uniola—but to me the most apt and evocative of all its names is spangle grass. This is a plant with a whole lot of flash.
In fall, it lights up a semi-shady spot with bright, coppery, oat-like seedheads that twinkle in the sunlight and flutter with every breeze. The seedheads also provide much-needed winter interest in the garden. After they’ve glittered their way through autumn, they persist—faded, ethereal, ghostlike—until spring.
A lot of grasses that really show off in fall and winter seem to like to take a backseat in summer. Well, spangle grass doesn’t do that. It’s eye-catching all year round. In the warm months its soft, bamboo-like leaves create a tropical effect. The leaves are lime-green in full sun and darker green in shade. Spangle grass is graceful and arching, loose and airy, and usually grows about thigh-high. Dangling pale green flowers appear in May or June.
Spangle grass occurs naturally in moist woodlands from Florida west to Arizona and north to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. A common component of mature bottomland hardwood forests, it is often found growing in isolated patches along streams.
In the wild, spangle grass provides cover and nesting spots for everything from turkeys and quail to rabbits, voles, and mice. Turkeys, wood ducks, and many other birds feast on the abundant seeds.
In the garden, spangle grass can be used in mass plantings or as a specimen. A clump here or there makes a great accent, especially near a water feature. The grass also works well in tubs and other large containers. Pair it with black-eyed Susans or native asters for extra dazzle in fall. The soft texture of spangle grass provides a welcome contrast to stiffer, coarser plants. In my yard, I have it planted close to some old-fashioned roses, and the combination of formal rose blossoms and free-flowing seedheads is really surprising and pretty.
Spangle grass is easy to grow. Though it flourishes in sun and moist, fertile soil, it also does well in part shade and dry, poor soil. My spangle grass grows in a dim, parched, sandy place under some wild sumacs on the north side of the house, and it thrives there even though I almost totally neglect it. (I do cut back its old growth in early spring.)
Planting spangle grass in dry shade is a good way to prevent it from self-sowing—a thing it will do like crazy given half a chance. You’ll definitely want to discourage it. Another way to keep “babies” from popping up all over your yard is to gather the seedheads in fall (if you don’t mind depriving the birds). They’re stunning in bouquets and dried arrangements, and they won’t shatter.
When I was growing up, my parents had a piedmont azalea that was queen of the side yard. From my earliest memory, it was sprawling and spready—utterly enormous. A grand thing. In spring it would be dressed in pale and shining raiment and surrounded by …
Red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) is a plant so spectacular that it once inspired me to change my life, to change careers, to quit my job and study horticulture. I was 33 and teaching English in Atlanta at a school I suspected was doing the kids …
I’ve never tasted a pawpaw, but I’ve often dreamed of it. I started to be aware of the existence of pawpaws and pawpaw trees about 15 years ago, when I worked at Georgia Wildlife Federation (GWF) near Atlanta. The organization did a lot to promote the use of native plants in home landscapes, and we even sold common pawpaw trees, which are native to a good portion of the country, at one of our fundraising events.
I had to write a little blurb about the common pawpaw (Asimina triloba) for our plant sale catalog, and the research I did while writing got me so excited. The little tree had big, lush, drooping leaves with a tropical look, I read, and delectable, custard-like fruit whose flavor and texture were likened, by more than one writer, to banana cream pie. I began to get a craving.
My dad told me he had eaten pawpaws before, as a little boy in North Carolina. They grew in the woods around his grandfather’s farm and he’d go picking them with his wild country cousins.
I asked him if the farm still existed.
No, Dad said, it had been developed into a subdivision. Those wild cousins had become millionaires.
Pawpaws were better known in the old days, I guessed, when there were more farms and woods and fewer subdivisions and people lived closer to the land.
 |
| Dad as a child (with Granny) in the 1940s |
The pawpaws we sold at GWF were grown by my colleague Terry, who owned 80 acres in the country and was well acquainted with these mysterious plants. In late summer, she and her husband would go pawpaw picking in the woods around GWF’s headquarters. Pawpaws looked kind of like short, fat bananas, she told me. “And when they’re ripe, you can just smell ‘em,” she said. “You can just follow your nose.”
I used to walk the trails in the woods around GWF, sniffing, hunting for pawpaws, but I never found any except a couple of green ones. They ripened, Terry told me, at some magic moment “usually around Labor Day.” Somehow I always missed it.
 |
| Georgia Wildlife Federation headquarters circa 2001 |
I didn’t plant my own pawpaw tree until I moved to Quincy—because my little backyard in Atlanta just didn’t have the room. Now I have four pawpaws. They’ve never fruited, not even the oldest ones, which I planted 10 years ago, but the trees themselves are quite decorative.
In early spring, at the same time or just before the leaves uncurl, small six-petaled flowers appear. They’re reddish brown and smell faintly fetid—two qualities that are very attractive to carrion-loving flies and poop-loving beetles, which are the pawpaw’s primary pollinators. I agree with the flies and beetles—the flowers are cute, though I don’t think they look like meat or poop. No, to me they look like little jingle bells arranged up and down the branches of the tree.
The leaves of the common pawpaw are bright green and glossy and can measure up to a foot long. Because of the way they hang from the tree, they put me in mind of the crystal droplets on a chandelier—they just kind of dangle.
 |
| New spring leaves |
The leaves are even prettier when they’re studded with tiny, bead-like butterfly eggs and striped caterpillars—at least that’s my opinion. Pawpaw hosts the zebra swallowtail. This beautiful butterfly is picky; it will only lay its eggs on plants in the genus Asimina—and throughout much of the zebra swalowtail’s range Asimina triloba is the only Asmina around. (This isn’t true in Florida, which has, I think, eight native pawpaw species.)
Common pawpaws can grow up to 30 feet tall, but 15 to 20 feet is more common. Pawpaws do best when they’re planted in part shade in deep, rich, loamy soil. Though they fruit better with more light, it’s tough to get them established in the open. Young trees, in my experience, need some protection from the sun.
My mom has a pawpaw tree in her yard, and it fruited last summer. She was so excited, she called me at work to tell me the news. “My pawpaw’s got pawpaws!” she exclaimed. I love this kind of phone call. A few weeks ago, Mom called me and announced, without even a hello, “Well, the robins have arrived on Avon Circle!” (Avon Circle is the name of her street.)
“Neat,” I replied.
“Got here this morning!” she went on. “Just a huge flock! Well, that’s my news for the day!”
I wished I could drive over to her house and rejoice with her, but I was stuck in my office (in a dreary basement).
 |
| Mom in her yard |
It was June of last year when Mom discovered her pawpaws. “Now when can I pick ‘em?” she asked me. “They’re just as green as can be.”
“Um, I’m not sure,” I said. “I know they get kind of yellow and speckled when they’re ripe, kind of like a banana. But I’m not sure how long it will take.”
Mom went to Wisconsin later that month, to visit her brothers and sisters. It was a terrible trip. While she was there her brother David died, and then a few days after she returned home, she had a heart attack. By the time she got out of the hospital, her precious pawpaws had disappeared.
“I guess a raccoon stole them,” I said.
“And I never even got to try one!” Mom lamented.
But we haven’t given up.
Mom called me the other day (at work) to tell me that her pawpaw was blooming. “Just covered in blooms!” she said.
Two of my trees are blooming too.
Come summer, we might be rolling in pawpaws. Who knows?
 |
| A couple little flower buds on one of my trees |
 |
| Flower fully open. The flowers usually hang down bell-like, but I turned this one over so you could see the inside. |
