Winter in Iowa can be a perilous time; patches of black ice can send your car spinning like a top; the young blonde waitress with a winter cold sneezes on your salad; last night a deer blasted across the road so closely in front of my car that I could hear his hoofs squeaking in the packed snow... however, these dangers all pale in contrast to the arrival of the Arrowhead Alpines catalogue. It innocently shows up in the mailbox every January; filled with page after page of small printed text, with no pictures save the covers; it would seem innocent enough... but it is the shoals of January... the site of the annual shipwreck of my garden budget. The owners, Bob and Brigitta, seem bent on accumulating every variation of every species that they can... I think Bob is really one of those mad, pack rat plant accumulators, who just sells a few plants to support his mania. At any rate, it is not a catalogue for everyone; there are, as I said, no pictures, there are no hardiness ratings... you are on your own in wandering about in this catalogue, but I wouldn't want it any other way... what other catalogue in this country would have sixty different kinds of campanulas? Enter this catalogue at your own risk! 
Katharine S White would have LOVED this catalogue! (next month's Gardener's Book Club selection is Two Gardeners: Katharine S. White & Elizabeth Lawrence--A Friendship in Letters)
ReplyDeleteAn excerpt of last year's catalog offerings:
CORYDALIS LUTEA
We haven't offered this in a while, but it hitch hiked back into the garden on a Sinocalucanthus that Lanhammer brought us, (be warned it is more of a weed than Dufu) however it too blooms forever and is great from a landscape point of view. In any event, it is now loose in our Hosta garden, and we have been potting up some of the excess, its just too pretty to throw on the compost pile.
I love this guy's prose.
Of Corydalis ex Dufu Temple: "...the most wonderful weed you could possibly have."
The only thing to touch this catalogue was Dan's Heronswood catalogue, where he'd tell of hiking through some impossibly high mountain pass in the wilds of western China, where he'd find this plant growing in a forest of snow white Himalayan birches and giant rhododendrons, with rodgersias and meconopsis as high as your shoulders.
ReplyDeleteDon
I remember the first time Arrowhead Alpines ended up in the mailbox. I did the "catalog shuffle" and it ended up on the bottom to the "To Be Read" stack. When I got to it I was struck by the font size which even with my glasses became a chore to read. Nonetheless when I finished laughing at Bob's intro I got into the meat of the catalog. From then on I can't wait for it to arrive. Don't think I have read the whole thing yet but it is a wealth of info.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that zones aren't listed is a little tricky but Fowlerville Michigan kind of gives a clue.
Glad you mentioned it!!
George Africa
Vermont Flower Farm