Taking Account

Post 83

What follows isn't always easy.

Winter has come quick and hard.

Which I can spin as a good corrective to the main weakness of the garden this last summer. For now, in the advent of bleak midwinter, is a good time to take account.

What did not work in the garden this year; An excess of zinnias. I was swayed by a large, cheap flat of multicolored zinnias at the farmstand. And instead of giving the extras away as I should have, I stuck small clumps of them in places they didn't belong, where they were too tall or too multicolored  to work. And then, of course, once I realized they didn't work, they were too big and full for me to have the heart to yank them out. 

To pull off the wild garden, it can't be too wild.  Next year no tempting flats of zinnias for me. I'm going to start my own instead, and just one variety, my favorite.: Queen Red Lime. That way they will unify the garden . A garden flourishes thanks to, not only the gardener's creativity, but also their self-criticism. 

Is it really so icky out or am I just grouchy from a cold that wouldn't go away?  I'm feeling the low-energy imposture blues. Time to stop writing before the self-criticism devolves in to mawk.

Thou I will wonder, does the water in a fire hydrent freeze like all the water around it, or is there some means to keep it liquid?  As you may guess, I never had physics in High School, just chemistry and lots of biology. And I often feel the want of it. My husband says it has to do with pressure.

Empathy, Or The Second Annual Beauty of Decay Post

Post 81

For a gardener, Fall can feel traumatic. What one has loved is passing away.

It is hard not to identify with the garden if one has subcreated and tended it with love.

 

Recently, at my day job, I got a reference call. The question? What is empathy?

 

The dictionary definition was too technical for the caller; she asked me if I could explain it. I said, approximately," It's like when you watch the evening news and you see a woman crying cause someone or something has died. Part of you hurts just seeing her go through it. And you'd like to make it better for her, just like you would like things to be made better for you when you're hurting."

        

This time of year we see a lot of stuff dying around us. Even though we've been told that plants do not feel pain, their seeming demise projects a somber quality, even though the colors of the turning foliage are the essence of liveliness. It's a suggestive paradox.

A long time ago I worked at a company that was loosing money and where it felt like everyone was fighting. At lunch a co-worker and I would go and sit in a quiet corner of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, trying to get some peace. I remember feeling as if all the world's misery was on my shoulders. I did not know it then, but I was heading into a depression. My friend said she felt it too. There was so much constant  disruption around us, it was as if we could feel peoples' pain bleeding into the air. And all we could do was breathe it in.

 

 Like I said, long time ago. But empathy can sometimes be almost a double-edge sword. People who are sensitive to others' pain sometimes get taken advantage of because of it. They breathe in others' pain and let it become their own. And frankly, I do not know of a human being on this earth who does not have enough pain. Nobody needs more.

 

For me, this season is useful for thinking about such things. As I get older, I feel I get freer, strong enough to feel empathy but also to keep better boundaries so as not to breathe in others' pain. And I've learned to mistrust people who expect or even ask me to do so. 

                                                                               

Most of us want most of the good stuff in life, much of which most of us never get all at once. I have found I need certain things, like privacy and freedom. I feel self-conscious easily. I dislike being guided by anything but my own small portion of intelligence, my conscience and the Holy Spirit. I hate control, and I consider underhanded attempts at control mean and ugly. I like to cooperate. I like to know what is going on and the more I know what is going on, the easier it is for me to cooperate. Nevertheless, I also know that at the center of life is Mystery, one that should not be too easily defined or confined.  I believe the laborer is worthy of her or his hire. And I know that love makes things thrive and if there is no thriving, then there is no love. And that I, like most of us, need to be loved and to love. And all this, of course, is nowhere near the definition of what I need. Like everyone, I am too complex for any such shorthand. But with age, I have at least learned a few basics.

Walking through this autumn world is a chance to rehearse what's been learned during all one's  cycles of growth and decay. To feel empathy without losing boundaries. To morn with the dead and exalt with the living. To be more circumspect and subtle than innate bluntness may normally allow. To affirm, while in time, that the outworn sometimes needs to go so that the new can be given space.

To bless the beauty of decay and hopefully, but wisely, await what follows.

Dogs, Autumn Leaves and other Intimations of Immortality

Post 82

Falls coming on.

Leafy duff in piles of fluff
Beguiles my dog

Who jacknives in,
Snorts and spins.

A purple leaf
Breaths on his nose,
He smells the cloves
Warming in the wine,

As we homeward trek;

Through flecks of life once lived
Trampled rainbow signs
Of all we hoped to bid
And all we knew must die.

Any dog can smell a coming meal;

Like the brightness of dead leaves
Bringing out this brighter feel
-- To what indeed may come
When all we know is done.

Small Decisions, Big Payoff

Post 80

Spring is change as beginning. Spring's flowers, after winter's dinge, jolt us with pleasure -- colors, smells,warmth, a liveliness once lost, now regained.

Gardeners share this enchantment at least as much as others. Sunny days bring us outside to work, of course, but in a flush of blooming exuberance, also to buy. The lure of the nursery with its rows and rows of promise, the dreams of future beauty piled on beauty, make a harmless temptation easy to give in to. Most of us are suckers and buy and buy and buy. Why not?



Well -- if you are starting a garden, no problem. Especially if you keep buying through gardening's three seasons. However, many of us keep buying for spring, even after we have sufficient spring bloomers, but lag at buying into the year as the flush of newness lessens.   Undreamy facts such as weeds, humidity, bugs and plain habituation have a way of lessening our original unnatural exuberance. Meaning many gardens look great from April-June, maybe July, and then go kaput.



 So how to keep going? Well. it's pretty simple really. But it takes self-discipline, which, of course, I stink at. And so it has taken me ten years to do what I might have done in three. But boy, is it worth it.

It's all in the small decisions. Every time you want to buy a plant or spread some seed, ask yourself --  when it will bloom? If the answer is spring , make sure you love, love, love it. If the answer is summer, make sure you love love it. And for fall... just get the darn plant if you like it at all. Because you will wind up love, love, loving it.

Think of the garden as a racehorse, you want/need an extrafast sprint at the end. Channel Velvet Brown whispering into the Pie's ear right before the end of the National.

Because winter is coming. Even though my garden still has two perennials yet to bloom (mums and wolfsbane,) winter's time is right behind them. And how much better to go into it with all the joy of the full drama of autumnal abundance. That way the decay can be rich and strange, not rote and predictable, making the next transformation into spring all that much more magical.

The Peaks Keep Peaking; or, Yup, a Garden is Female

Post 79

Two posts ago I said the garden was peaking out. I inadvertently lied. Because the garden is still peaking and is going to continue to do so whatever I say.

 

I think I have finally figured this out. There is no peak; there are peaks. Call it a blooming mountain range. The above ground peaks start at the end of March and end sometime in October/November. And a winter camilia is just a token of the peaking going on under the earth through winter as roots grow and seeds burst open. But here I am, waiting for the garden to lessen it's impact just because the solstice is passed.

Luckily, the garden will have its way and show delight regardless of the odd, theoretical words this gardener gets stuck on. Which seems a good cue for perhaps some finer words, apropos as summer comes to a close.

WHO MAKES A GARDEN

by Nancy Byrd Turner

Who makes a garden plans beyond her knowing.

Old roads are lost; old dwellings have their day;

And she herself, far summoned, passes hence

An unfamiliar way;--

But no, she has not perished with her going;

For year by year as April's heart is stirred,

Spring after punctual Spring,

Across the little acres' wintry grey

Comes slowly traced, an old authentic word

In radiant lettering:

A shining script of tendril, vine and whorl,

New green, faint rose, clear lavender and pearl,

Petal by delicate petal, leaf by leaf,

As though her own hand from the Mystery 

Wrote, for all earth to see, upon a fadeless, beauteous scroll,

Her brief for immortality.

Who knows? It is all a big fat mystery, however we see it. We might as well enjoy it, allowing our mistakes the mercy they deserve,

and our harmless delights the respect they deserve, the dignity they harbinger and the beauty that perhaps they foretell.

.

August
by Edmund Spenser

August, being rich arrayed
In garment all of gold down to the ground,
Yet rode he not, but led a lovely maid
Forth by the hand, that which was crowned
With ears of corn, and full her hand was found:
That was the righteous Virgin, which of old
Lived here on earth, and plenty made abound. 

Shout Out for an Unlikely Garden Guru--John Fowler

Like most, I tune out wisdom by cliche. Wisdom by surprise, however, acts on me like an interesting  garden does; it energizes me.

Above is a book about interior design that I read in the 90s. The library no longer owns it, so I can no longer quote from it. It is mostly about a design firm that specialized in big, old, English houses, defining a style that was comfy, livable and condign with the houses' and the country's history. Colefax and Fowler did not single-handedly create the modern English County House Style, nevertheless, their fingerprints remain all over it. And John Fowler, who with Nancy Lancaster (an American from Virginia,) was head of the company, was the man who oversaw the decorative painting and soft furnishings. No one could do trim like him.

 So how does that make him a garden guru? Good question.

 

Somewhere in that big book pictured above, Fowler makes a remark incidental to decorative painting. It caught my attention because it described something different from the aesthetic modes that were zipping around through the 60s and 70s and influenced my taste.

Fowler said that a viewer's eye is pleased by the combination of bright and muddy colors. Always add a little mud, he said (or something to that effect;) it makes the brights stand out. Visualize such a combination in your mind's eye versus a Peter Max poster or a David Hicks' room. Works by 60s icons tended to be all bright on bright, all the colors at the same high intensity, while in the 70s things went all drab on drab, remaining at the same low intensity. Think of sage green and mauve, or grey-blue and beige or that ubiquitous (shudder,) avocado, burnt orange and mustard. These tints were everywhere, in the clothes we wore, the rooms we sat in, the possibilities we imagined, a mood of the times.                                                                                                                                But Fowler hearkened back to a different time (and mood,) all together.

 

Here is an early painting by Gainsborough. Note how dull the overcast day is, yet somehow an errant sunglow has escaped from the otherwise beautifully clotted colors to light up the artist and his family. Look how handsomely that crimson waistcoat shines forth. Even the grass upon which the family sits is luminous, and all the more luminous for the otherwise drab surroundings. Not only is this a fittingly accurate show of Brit weather, it is also (perhaps,) a loving tribute to the light of family love in individual consciousness, for this is Gainsborough painting himself with his own family. Note how the wife's clear, sky-blue dress seems to almost chide the sky.

So what does that out-of-the-blue art lecture have to do with gardens, or more specifically, my garden, as pictured above. Well, though I love it when plants blossom, it is hard to keep them all blossoming all the time. Plants need rest. Then how do you supply interest? You can do it with structure. You can do it with texture. You can do it with foliage color.

Lots of books will tell you to use variations of foliage color other than leaf-green so as break up what can otherwise be a boring mass of green. However, most colorful foliage is not as enticing as flowers, meaning this method shouldn't really work. Yet it does. Could this be so because Fowler is right about muddies and brights?  For in the garden, foliage can create constant highlights and lowlights, giving illusions of depth and light and therefore, of greater space.

So--in this post are pictures of my garden showing four useful foliage colors. I like using yellow-green and pale grey-green as highlights and dirty purple/brown, darker grey-green and blue-green as lowlights.

 

Above is a pic that contains three of these foliage colors; blue-green, pale grey-green and purple-brown. Sure they are dull-- but oh, what dulls!

My favorite may be the muted blue-green. Its coolness gives contrast to the more usual warm green of typical foliage, adding depth and giving sparkle.

Well, enough blathering. I haven't even mentioned red as a foliage color or all the variegated foliage possibilities that abound, but I expect that you get the picture.

Gardening is a visual art (among other things,) so you can learn a lot about it from things that claim to have nothing to do with it. Learning builds on itself regardless of how we humans chop up our naturally seamless lives into categories.

All this I have learned from a gentleman who named his favorite dull colors things like "Elephant's Breath," and "Mouse Back"-- and then used them to shine up the grandest of grand houses. There is something about that, a balance, a weird humility, a sense of wholeness, that I really like.