Fall Clean-Up and Thanksgiving

Post 56

I should write about Fall clean up, which I should be doing, but I'm not, since I've got another cold. So I'm posting some pics of my last blooms to make up for lack of weightier content.

Orange-leaved Crepe Myrtle, cobalt Wolfsbane and purple dried Hydrangea--an unplanned color combo that delivers quite a pow. The hydrangeas, right before they go brown, turn extraordinary shades of purple.

 

 

Aside from some of the easy roses, what other plant gives you so much umph from Late June to early November?  Late blooming anemones are also dramatic against the changing foliage.

Has pink ever looked so strong?

And of course the last bloomer, the perennial chrysanthemums with residual mistflower and geranium.

And the remnants of other flowers here and there.

 

In Thanksgiving for a lovely gardening season, Happy Turkey Day.

Wissahickon Style IV, Lack of Pretension

Post 26

A bad back has increased my grouchiness while decreasing my inspiration. Hence my not keeping up with weekly posts, So I'm going to go for an easy topic: lack of pretension, to keep things going. 

By lack of pretension -- I mean everything from having an undisguised television set (no, not media center, never media center,) in the living room to a sign for your garden written in chalk. For me, the best of Wissahickon style is not hoity-toity,  but scuffed-up white shoe.

Here are street number tiles embedded in a schist wall. They are old tiles, probably Mercer, cracked and riven, much like the rock and mortar they are set in. One of the clues to real style is that it has an unifying integrity. Pretension usually shows itself up as the slapping together of various items with nothing in common but their value as status tags. Hence the odd fact that style can seem to reflect a moral state.

Time as eventual destroyer of all things is never recognized by pretension. Old objects are only valued as consumer goods. The imprecations of time as such are usually erased by the up-to-date or, even more oddly, by other old items from whatever historical period is currently au courant.

A true unitive integrity of style may be as impossible to achieve as perfectly human integrity, but for any attempt at either, humility is needed. And humility means being in touch with our true humanity, the humus of our being, that we are mortal, fallible creatures at the mercy of time and tide.

Architecture that rears up against this truth is unlikely, in the long run, to enhance human flourishing. But architecture that helps us own up to our humanity softens the imprecations of time. It can then become a comforting presence, and, as an unifying style, set an example of how to get things right.

Thanksgiving

Post 16

Deerfield Village, MA

Now is the time for giving thanks. We are problem-solving, stimuli-hungry animals who lose track of the common and uncommon graces of our lives.

Somehow, for me, gardening slows down time. For after an hour or so of digging, smelling, placing, moving, something in me stills. Only then do I truly begin to feel, really feel, the sun massaging my shoulders or the fine texture of  grit on my fingers

It's easy to be so busy thinking/planning/solving that living, feeling unwanted, gets out of the way.

The word gratitude, comes from the Latin gratitudo and gratus. Which means thankful. It also means pleasing, as in pleasure...

Pleasure gets no respect. We suspect it because it can lead us astray. But it can also lead us right.

Part of adolescence is learning to extract pleasure from things we originally find repugnant. From booze to tobacco to movies without happy endings, we learn to overcome instinctive pleasure. How else can we be cool and grown-up? We learn to tolerate, even be proud of,  the deadening side effects of overiding our nature, and then wonder, years later, what's gone wrong.

Maturity, among so many other things, may be about shedding such roughshodding over pleasure.

Pleasure is easy.  It is everywhere. And much of it is innocent. It does not hurt you or anyone else. That is the pleasure to go for, to be grateful for.

According to the OED, the second meaning of gratitude is grace. Like the the grace of innocent pleasure, there for us when we want it.

So is the act of feeling pleasure, in an of itself, a type of gratitude? The answer seems both obvious and paradoxical.

The reason I've made a garden is because it gives me pleasure, a pleasure I learned about by experiencing other peoples' garden. I hope my garden passes on that pleasure. I hope this blog with its pictures does too. It is a way of saying thanks.