The other night I dragged home a large stack of gardening and plant books of various vintages from the library. Some aren't terribly useful, some are delightful, but the one I'm most enjoying for my current purpose (finding (mostly) native plants for the yard) is George D. Aiken's _Pioneering with Wildflowers_. As I started to read it, I totally missed something that makes it, to my mind, even more charming: Aiken was not just a nurseryman and life-long plant lover, he was Vermont's governor and a US Senator. Anyone who loves moneywort as much as I do has won my heart, anyway, but I would like to think that a government full of gardeners would be... something.
Although he started writing editions of the book in the 1930s, I've got the 1978 edition in hand, and I have a question, for anyone else familiar with the book: there is a lovely photo of allotropa virgata, candystick, but nowhere in the book does there appear to be a description. Since the book is about growing native plants, I would think Aiken managed to grow this stunner, too, but on-line research so far suggests to me that it's not an easy one. (An NPR Earth and Sky program reports it needs, hm, was it fungus plus some other local condition to grow.) Is candystick a plant one could grow in the home garden? Does Aiken write about it in a section omitted from this edition?
-another Ann, on the family farm in zone 5