Roses in February

Post 25

It may be warm,  but it is bleak and the garden, well... see what I mean.

I need a rose.

Yes, that helps. It is not easy to write a gardening blog in these months, especially if you want to avoid the usual winter cliches. Looking at the local architecture that holds up our gardens, cradles and rocks them, is a partial solution, but not an entirely gratifying one. The light is hard, the buildings unsoftened. I need more roses.

Yes, better.  One of the drawbacks of bleakness, which feels like nature's boredom, can be a lack of solid inspiration. And without real inspiration I may start to extravagate (no, not a word but should be (OED--pay attention! (Like Auden, one of my dream aspirations is to coin a new word and get it credited there; unlike Auden, it's a dream aspiration.))) To clarify, to extravagate means to unthinkingly exaggerate to a point almost past truth (though a kernel remains.) It lacks malice but remains an easy temptation for those of us who are of imagination a bit too compact. Itself an example of extravagation, it is a word that I made up in High School without realizing I'd made it up. I extravagantly extravagated exaggeration into extravagate. 

In short, in my last post I extravagated. I dissed mansions and castles. I do not really dislike them, just the more money than taste ones. 

And now, keeping on theme,(yes, there is a theme,) I am going to slip back towards an earlier post, "Roses in January," and fill in some information I did not include in the earlier post on The Red Rose Girls.

Below is a picture of Cogslea that shows more of the house and less of the caryatids.

And here's one of Cogshill from the back

The pergola at Cogshill.

And here is a relevant illustration from Elizabeth Shippen Green's scrapbooks at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Last of all. I want to credit the source of most of my information on The Red Rose girls. It is the book,  The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love by Alice A. Carter, ISBN 978-0810944374.

And I also want to add a caveat, that this is an informal blog. Like informal correspondence and other forms of informal writing, such a blog is not meant to be read as a solid reference source. I try to be accurate but I do not fact check everything. For instance, I made a mistake about Edith Emerson in my earlier RRG post. I have gone back and corrected it as I value accuracy.  At times however, I can find even myself a bit too transported by the act of writing, and end up extravagating reality's rose into a slightly stranger flower. So please, take this with a grain, though not a bucket, of salt. I know I do.

Mistakes, or the Misplaced Butterfly Bush

Post 4

Mistakes: you will make them.

Can you spot it? It's that blobitity lump of silver-green smack in the middle front. A Butterfly Bush I was deluded enough to think would stay small. It didn't, ruining an otherwise successful rock garden.  Plus, the bush's mass confuses the flow of space; instead of drawing the eye in, it pushes the gaze out. Which irks me. Part of me wants the garden to be better, perfect, a sort of garden porn. 
 
Do you see the problem here? Red myrtle, red maple and ... invasive Lythrum salicaria, aka Purple Loosestrife. In England it is a lovely, manageable garden plant.  Here it destroys rivers, clots streams and chokes wetlands. I must pull it out. Which hardly seems fair since I did not plant it. The wind and rain did. But it's my responsibility now.

The words humus, humility and human are cognate. Sometimes, as I garden, it feels as if humility is seeping up into me from the humus. And it feels like strength, not weakness, a beatitude of the garden.

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a process and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect: part of it is decaying, part nascent…And in all things there are certain inequalities and deficiencies, which, are not only sources of life but sources of beauty." Alvar Aalto

The Butterfly Bush is now in bloom, and true to its nature, it is making the butterflies very happy. It will bloom, on and off, from now till fall, when I will transplant it to a better place further back in the yard. It will still please the flutterbys, but also contribute to the overall beauty of the garden.

The beauty I want to create is a different kind of beauty than the usual, temptingly-perfect garden porn.  What I want instead, is a sensuous expression of the integrity and inter- and outer-connectiveness of a particular environment.  For me, to garden is to find and express a presence, an itness, a balance of energy and order of being, tempered to a loved and local, time and place. 

"Presence is why we love what we cannot eat or mate with... Presence matches our speed; thus it seems not flow, but all arrivals— The beginning mirrored everywhere. The true indictment. The end all through the story."  Les Murray in "Sunflowers"

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Addendum--posted the above yesterday and this morning noticed that a spider had thrown a guyline from the pink coneflowers (you can see them in the bottom pic,) to a stem at the back of the bush.  This pleases me, since around here, garden spiders are good news. They are nonpoisoness and eat mosiquitos and other pests. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How-to: Butterfly Bush or Buddleia davidii, is hardy in our area and easy to grow. It likes sun and some water (but not bog,) will survive drought, and depending on the variety, can be anywhere from 3 to 12 feet tall. The trick is to remember to prune it in the spring, not fall, and only after you can see the beginnings of new buds. For the most blossoms, prune the stems down to about 6 inches. If, however, you want to encourage height, you will still get some bloom if you prune it up higher. It can make an attractive, overhanging backdrop to a sunny or even slightly shaded border. Besides the lavender-blue pictured above, it also comes in a wonderful dark purple, white and even some reddish and orangey shades. It is a dependable, unfussy plant, but can look awkward if badly placed (duh!) or if left undeadheaded after blooming, since numerous curly wands of brown decay can be a hard look to make work.