The Lawnchair Gardeners, Ed O'Rourke Jr. and Leon C. Standifer.
This month is dedicated to the performing arts. We have a tale about the time when LSU’s horticulture department and school of music cooperated to produce musical reeds—the kind you use to play oboes, bassoons and clarinets.
Leon: Hang in there while I introduce one of the participants in that project. John Patterson, long since retired from the school of music, won the Korean War by playing a saxophone. That isn’t quite true, but I enjoyed teasing him about it. During combat times army bandsmen were the “gofers” at division headquarters. They carried wounded men on stretchers, stood guard duty, and fought as riflemen, when needed. After the war, John went to graduate school at the University of Texas and then came to LSU to teach whatever needed being taught. He graduated from the saxophone to the bassoon and several other woodwinds, and he played in the Baton Rouge Symphony orchestra for twenty-five years. As student instruments got broken he began repairing them, so when he retired he repaired woodwinds as a sideline. This fit well with his main hobby of woodworking. John and I were in the same Sunday school class and, soon after his retirement, we had a guest speaker on the topic of preparing for retirement—and how he could help us with investments. His opening “set the hook” question was: “How many of you expect to make more money after retirement than you did before?” John raised his hand; he was retired and making a lot more money. We laughed, and the speaker lost his cool.
So that is John Patterson, a friend, wit, and fellow cynic who is now living in Albuquerque. Several years ago he was telling me about this project where he and another musician were making reeds from a French plant that the horticulture department had grown. They made some pretty good reeds that weren’t up to the French quality. They still needed to tinker with the processing technique or maybe the cultural practices for growing the plant. Well, I had never heard of the project and didn’t know what had happened to it. I asked Ed and he had an interesting tale.
Ed: I was wondering if Leon would ever get around to the topic for this article. The best musical reeds are made from a plant grown in the estuary of the Var River in Southern France, and called the “anche du Var.” The botanical name for this plant is Arundo donax and it grows pretty well in the marshes of Southern Louisiana, where it is cleverly called the giant reed. It is a tall, rather woody, plant that duck hunters use in building blinds.
Julian Miller, who was head of the horticulture department, thought this plant might have some potential for a Louisiana cottage industry. He and his friend in the school of music got some of the French plants and grew them in comparison with the local variety (It isn’t native and probably came from France). Somebody made reeds from them and thought the idea had promise. Julian wrote up a proposal to conduct research on this, saying that three or four farmers could produce enough plants and a small craftsman team would process the reeds. Well, as has often happened, the proposal died when someone in the Experiment Station saw that it wouldn’t result in tons of plant products and carloads of reeds for oboes and bassoons.
Leon: Friends, if Ed sounds bitter about this. He is, and he is right—sort of. We have lost this argument many times. The administrator says: “Yes, I understand what you want, but you need to remember that our funding comes through the State Legislature. They want to hear about large commercial projects that will revolutionize horticulture as we know it today.”
Ed: Well, it does get irritating to read about a wonderful new research project that we tried many years ago. I saw a report on a study of pigeon peas (Cajanus cajan, no, it was not introduced by the Acadians). We ran trials with pigeon peas many years ago, reported the results, and nothing came of it.
And, back in the sixties—the Age of Aquarius—the state police asked us to grow marijuana plants for their identification courses. I was teaching greenhouse management back then and was surprised at the sudden interest of some students in techniques for growing plants indoors—under artificial lights. I understood why when the police came by to ask if I could use some high intensity lights in the greenhouse. They had confiscated them from some of our students who had been growing marijuana in a closet.
Leon: Friends, our students were very creative, almost artistic, about ways to grow marijuana. I remember when some students asked me about growing hops plants and how they might graft onto the rootstock of another species. They probably asked me instead of Ed because they thought I might not realize what they wanted to do. There was a tale going around that you could graft a hops shoot onto a marijuana rootstock and nobody would realize what you were really growing. There were tales of smoking marijuana-laced hops leaves and of making marijuana beer. I played naive and went along with them because I had read the report from a research project at Ole Miss saying that they used an approach graft to put hops on a marijuana rootstock and the hops shoots grew pretty well but there was no marijuana resin in the hops leaves. Except for a slight growth inhibition, the marijuana roots had no effect on hops. I don’t know how the student project turned out, but wonder if they might have gotten a slight high on hops leaves. If they thought there was some marijuana resin, well, maybe the placebo effect made it work.
During the course of their careers as professors of horticulture at LSU, Ed O’Rourke and Leon Standifer gleaned an extraordinary sum of indispensable gardening knowledge—and a lot of knowledge of other kinds too. Much of this is to be found in the pages of their book, Gardening in the Humid South, published by LSU Press.
